This eye-opening collection of essays is about 100 Indian women scientists from the Victorian era to the present-day. Contemporary women give moving accounts of what brought them to science and what kept them going despite the exorbitant social and personal dues they paid along the way. Science historians and amateur writers present the narratives of memorable personalities who are no more. The stories are compelling even where the writing lacks finesse. As an Indian\u00a0inorganic chemist and a science writer who came to the U.S. for graduate studies, I find echoes from my past in every chapter of the book.<\/p>\n

Even the title tells a tale. Lilavati was the daughter of Bhaskaracharya, the renowned 12th-century mathematician. As the head astronomer of the royal observatory in Ujjain, Bhaskaracharya authored an arithmetic text wherein he addressed problems in algebra, geometry, and discrete mathematics to his doe-eyed daughter. History does not record whether Lilavati became a mathematician herself, but the fact that her \u00a0father deemed her worthy of solving those problems suggests that she indeed might have. Inheritors of Lilavati\u2019s intellectual legacy, the women in \u201cLilavati\u2019s Daughters,\u201d with few exceptions, mention an encouraging father. Embarking on a rigorous voyage of learning would be quite impossible without such a central figure in their early years; mentors come only later.<\/p>\n

Chronologically, the first achiever in this book is Anandibai Joshi, who, in 1886, was the first Hindu woman to obtain a medical degree in the U.S. \u201cBefore my marriage, I could barely read Marathi [an Indian language],\u201d writes Pooja Thakar, who recounts Joshi\u2019s story as a first-person narrative. But when 19-year-old Joshi set sail to America, she was literate in English, thanks to her husband. Readers probably recall from their university days an awkward international student who had to cope with school and culture shock simultaneously. Imagine how hard the acclimatization must have been for Joshi, an orthodox Hindu woman and strict vegetarian from the tropics facing the winters of the East Coast. For a sari-clad woman living by herself in an alien land, the weather brought forth a moral dilemma. Wearing Western attire for protection from the cold was unthinkable for Joshi, Thakar writes. At 22, when Joshi became a qualified physician, the Queen of England sent her a congratulatory note.<\/p>\n

Among the early-20th-century women scientists, Marie Curie is one schoolchildren in India learn about, but no textbook mentions India\u2019s own women scientists from that period. For example, in 1940, a young woman, Anna Mani, signed up to do research work in spectroscopy under Sir C. V. Raman, a Nobel Laureate in physics, at the Indian Institute of Science. Abha Sur, a science historian at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in the book about this formidable woman in the chapter \u201cAn Appreciation of Anna Mani.\u201d Although Raman was a brilliant scientist, writes Sur, he had rather quaint notions about any casual interaction between the sexes at his institute, dismissing it as \u201cscandalous.\u201d If the atmosphere of segregation hung heavy in the lab, Mani never let on, according to this account. She was not granted a Ph.D. despite publishing five single-author papers on spectroscopy during her time at the institute. After a long scientific career, she retired as the deputy director general of the Indian Meteorological Department.<\/p>\n

Mani remained single all her life, but other women scientists featured in this anthology did marry. A recurring theme that runs through the book is the fact that being married entails a long list of family responsibilities for Indian women, which sometimes eats into the time they can devote to science.<\/p>\n

In her essay, \u201cA Career in Mathematics,\u201d Mangala Narlikar wistfully describes herself as a part-time scientist. She finished a Ph.D. in mathematics 16 years after she got married. Household responsibilities came first for this self-effacing mother of three and wife of a famous Indian astrophysicist. Her story, she writes, is representative of many in her generation born around the year of India\u2019s independence in 1947. In the chapter \u201cNegotiating Choices,\u201d Charusita Chakravarty, a present-day chemist who relinquished her U.S. citizenship and now works in India, writes that women make matrimonial decisions in their late 20s and early 30s. But during this same period, they have to establish themselves as independent researchers, just like their male colleagues, she points out.<\/p>\n